Visual communication has always been political

Abstract

This article is an invitation to engage with the small ‘p’ politics of visual political communication by highlighting the importance of both culture and history, in order to gain greater understanding of how images and the visual more broadly may ‘work’ on us and contribute to our imaginaries as well as our understanding of political messages and political life as a whole. Specifically, the article aims to encourage scholars in this field to engage less with strategy and tactics or persuasion and effects to delve more deeply into why and how visual meanings become politically powerful over time and in particular contexts. In doing so, the article foregrounds the work of two major scholars of the visual, Stuart Hall and Michel Pastoureau, and promotes an approach focusing on the more seemingly mundane, taken-for-granted and everyday meanings and practices underlying visual political communication. To demonstrate this approach, the article offers an in-depth discussion of the photograph used in the ‘Breaking Point’ poster at the centre of the political campaign which was launched by UKIP leader Nigel Farage in the run-up to the 2016 Brexit referendum.